Respect

As my responsibilities grow, I get to witness lot more interactions, and many a times have felt like sharing this thought. Hopefully I can pen this in a useful manner and make a note for myself as well.

What is respect?

Respect is a level of appropriateness that is required in every action that we undertake while dealing with another person. The action can be an email, or a message or a discussion or just a hi while passing in the corridor. It has to be maintained irrespective of our mood or feelings towards the person. While, it is human to be upset or not like a person, but the way we behave has to be at par with the respect that is due. Its unconditional.

Who to respect?

There are three types of people that I consider respect worthy, those who are healthy, wealthy and wise. Any individual with any one of these deserves respect. Lets look at the three qualities one by one.

Who is wise? 

As we grow older, we learn somethings that we are good at, some that we think we will never be or want to be. Everyone we deal with has gone through this cycle and is what he or she is. We have to respect it. Think of the office boy or maid, they respect us for our money or our skills that they don't have. Do we want to do their job? Can we? In professional life, e.g. sales people can think sales is everything, but that designer who designed the brochure is critical for our success, respect is due. Designers may think, we are greatest, but think of the person who actually sold or delivered the product one designed, a design isn't worth anything till it is put in its rightful place. Respect everyone whose job we can't do or don't want to. Its integral to functioning of the world or society or organization.

Why healthy?

In the world today, when people have different reasons to die early, a person who has lived for more years than I have, is healthy for me. Age is something that we can never equal. We can't be as old as our parents ever, neither can we catch up to the old man who blessed us before our very first big break in life. It takes a lot to age. The trouble that a 5 year old goes to be 6, or a 13 year old goes to be an adult, or an adult goes to be a partner or a parent or a manager, is something that we can only appreciate as much. Age deserves respect.

and wealthy... really?

Now that's a tough one. There are two types of wealth, self earned and inherited. Generally self earned is easier to accept (or not). Is inherited wealth as good? In hindu mythology the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, is placed at par with Kali (goddess of power) and Saraswati (goddess of education). Wealth, in essence, is a form of power, it comes with its own set of responsibilities. If one doesn't deliver on the responsibilities, the power will wane. That's the law of nature. We don't know how they are delivering on their responsibilities. So, if someone has wealth, it is a sign of responsibility the person is carrying. It deserves its respect.

How to respect?

The "how" part of respect varies across cultures, context and ages. We can learn from others and experiment our own ways to show respect. I will leave this for the individual to decide. The only thing to keep in mind is that anything that is done is considered part of respect, intentional or unintentional.

In retrospect...

I can easily remember a recent instance where I did not respect a person who has more than one of these respect worthy qualities. It has been months since, but I still am not able to get over it. I promised myself, never to let myself slip again. This post is a reminder to me.

Consumer Product Design UX from a Techie Dad

(Its been more than 3 years since I wrote a post, 1221 days to be precise. The culprit is likely facebook and twitter which help dump a thought in less than 25 words. Let me see how much I can write today!)

A lot of times when we try to develop a product or a feature, our techies tend to start "why can't a user do it this way..", the answer comes only with experience. Once I was reading an article about why do certain things that they do, the answer was simple, because "they can". The same applies to a consumer product, users will do something because they can.

Often there is another way to protest some thing, "aren't user's intelligent to figure this out.. ". Well again, the kids today figure out the tabs and mouse operation as if they were born to operate it. The realization is that they (kids and users) are way too intelligent and will try to do things the way its "natural" or "intuitive".

If a product is not designed inline with "natural" and to handle the stuff that "can" be done, it results in "what did the user do to get here...". This one again is rarely traceable, like when we see our baby climb up or sing a made up song, we have no way to trace back. The product needs to be designed to be simple and a single way to get to a point.

... and the real UX is to predict and design accordingly.

Are you gold?

This is an article I wrote for our internal newsletter, sharing here for wider audience who are working as professionals.

 
These days, we hear news of gold hitting all time high almost on daily basis. It is not just now, whenever times have been tough in the modern history, gold has become more valuable.

Let's look at what makes this yellow metal so precious:
1. Gold Shines
2. Gold works great as investment even in worst of times
3. Gold is valuable in all its uses

I think we should imbibe these qualities in ourselves as professionals.

The most important quality we identify gold with, is its shine. Anytime we see a gold item that's not shining we have doubts on its quality. How do we shine as professionals? We shine though our communication and compassion in our jobs. We are extremely lucky to be working in an organization where, looking at our trainees, compassion will be an automatic reaction. We want to set high standards not just for them but also for our colleagues with top quality communication. We must shine in every action we do at work.

In our professional life we will come across tough times. Those who perform consistently will become more valuable members of the team. This is time to work harder and smarter to get to our goals. Always remember, rewards are much higher when performance is good in difficult times.

Gold is valuable in every form be it bullion, investment or jewellery. The more it is diluted, the more importance it gets, think of diamond jewellery, it is never made from pure gold but is valued more than pure gold jewellery. With the kind of growth we have seen, and we will continue to see, it will be required for all of us to take on different roles across organization and locations. We should make sure that we are doing the best we can; in every task we are assigned. Remember it is the Gold that valued not the item that gold is made into.

Quoting from "A Tale of two Cities" by Charles Dickens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way" - in short, the period was so far like the present period.

This is the time you should ask yourself, every day you come to work, "Are you gold?" I do.

A "social" solution to suicides in IITs

"IIT-Kanpur: Eight cases of suicide in 5 yrs"

This is not a news that any alumni would be proud of. Though it has been a case of at least 1 suicide per year @ IIT K. May be now it is more than before, or same and we feel its more because the news spreads faster in the world.But this definitely is a problem that needs to be looked into.

A very very good solution in my view is described below, in the words of Dr. Ashok Gupta:

I would like to share with you a modest attempt to prevent suicides on IITK Campus that we recently launched. Students at IITK have been very appreciative of this effort. Let me briefly describe it.
We have set up a Blog "Go For It..." Every month we will publish story of an alumni who struggled as student at IIT but is now doing well in life and career. We will also publish stories of alumni who chose to follow their dream and are doing what their heart desires, especially pursuing a non-traditional career path. The link to these stories are shared with students at IITK (through student Gymkhana) and posted on various Facebook pages that students and alumni visit.
The two stories currently on the Blog have exceeded our expectations. We have had more than 23,000 views. Comments on these stories have been made by not just IITK students and faculty but also by IITD, IITB, IITkgp and even non-IIT readers. Readers have engaged with featured alumni.

My take on the situation and possible solutions:

Can counselling parents help? 

I would be interested to know the background of parents in these cases and see if we can coach the parents at all. I distinctly recall, in my stay, we had one case of suicide in hall-2 and I clearly remember his parents profession and their total monthly income could have been about 3-4k, both working day in and out. (Compared to that my own monthly expense was 1.5k incl. mess and canteen when I was a "frugal" guy.) If this guy made it to IIT, it must be his determination and parents would, at best be able to tell him "do as you seem fit". I fear touching such parents, will complicate their simple lives.

I would think the parents are the same as they have always been, so are students, so are the expectations and so are the professors.

So what has changed?

Last December I visited IIT-K after almost 10 years. Like everyone else, the place had so many fond memories of my days, but in this visit I found the place had completely changed. There are so many rules, so many security guards, so much traffic, I just could barely relate to the place with my memories.

All the freedom, coziness is gone, so has the personal space we had. The infra is far too loaded than it should be and that is causing the stress. I felt stressed out walking around with so many SIS guards staring at me in a 100 m stretch. That in my view is the main problem. There is no personal space for people to catch a breath and take right decisions.

We need to create that space again. I would think we need a more "social"(as in facebook social) solution. The stories are good, people will read and discuss. Also, the counselling service needs to be revamped and made a by the students, for the students body and it should have people who are interested in people rather than the ones professors thinks should represent counselling service. There should be proper tracking by students or may be by alumni. Another thing, we can do is to assign an alumni,with similar background, with individual students to communicate on emails or phone, may be. Getting in touch directly a person will have even better impact than reading stories about them.

Even though its been 12 years and I had barely spent 15-20 mins in "intro" with him, the pain of loosing that junior, not being able to help him, is still in my heart. I hope we come up with something that helps!

Software Product Development for Core sectors

You have a startup idea, good.
You make a revolutionary product on your idea, excellent.
Your competitors are some big companies trying to fit in their existing product to fix the exact problem that your product solves, not good.
You are pitched against these big companies in your first ever big deal with a big client, very bad.

Why bad? As a startup, more often than not the sustainability depends on cracking this first mega deal, while any large company would look at the sustainability of the software provider through the life-cycle of the product which is typically 3-5 years. So if the startup is pitched against one of the established player, inspite of having the better product it looses out on the point of sustainability in the final round of selection. This has been a story of many a startups.

The option of angel investor could help in showing sustainability, but then the funds from angel investors are most times not enough to sustain for that long. Also, showing support of angel investor may be taken as indication towards a yet-to-mature company, hence acting contrary to the expected help.

So whats the solution?

The solution is to sell your product before writing it. Let me explain. If the product solves a problem for a particular industry or domain, then you can contact any small or medium sized company in the domain and sell the product to them and build it as per their specifications. But the product must be designed to be fully customizable for the domain. Once the product is ready and live then selling it becomes a different ball game altogether. The best case would be when you can market the product along with your first client as it gives the sustainability. Likely the company, being a core sector company, won't have a software division capable of maintaining the product so as the software provider all future maintenance would keep earning you the revenue. The future revenues from the product can be shared with the client while keeping full revenue from customizing and maintenance for future client.

This is a win-win situation for both the startup as well as forward looking core sector company. The company gets an alternate source of revenue while the startup gets a kind of parent to nurture and support it. The deal can be made such that the product is initially designed as a custom made software at a discounted rate (to account for extra effort required in implementing a customizable design).

Once you have good product idea, all you need is some good salesman skill, a company looking to diversify to get a successful startup.

Best of luck!!

7 Reasons why Sachin is God

If I don't post this, I would never feel good about blogging.

I wished to have 200 reasons, but 7 is a number often associated with offerings to God so...

1. He has played cricket at international level for over 20 years, mostly at the top of ranking charts.
2. His name was never used in any controversy, be it match fixing or captaincy or coach related.
3. If Dhoni is taking Indian cricket to such heights, his captaincy was decided by a light weight comment from him. "Some young like Dhoni should be captain", he had told Sharad Pawar. This line should be as popular as "Miyan, kaptan banoge?"
4. He has changed the way ODI is played, it took all of Australian team to change the way Tests are played. Australia had so many great players, he is all alone changing things around.
5. He has achieved what was thought impossible, 200 runs in ODI is just one of them.
6. Gods have a way to rise above equals. I remember there was a time when Mark Waugh, Brian Lara, Jayasurya and Sachin were between 10-15 centuries each. We used to be worried who would be at the top. Sachin has quietly risen above them and no one is complaining.
7. Gods sometimes do not do what we expect them to, e.g. Hanuman could have single handedly taken Sita back to Sri Ram he did not, or lord Krishna could have won Mahabharata single handedly rather he chose not to fight at all. Sachin may retire without winning a World Cup.

In mythology, gods would incarnate to kill someone because that was required then. Today, we have enough killings as it is in the world we need peace, so we have Sachin, as god, uniting the world. I got tweets by Pakistanis celebrating his 200, when he had broken 13 year old record of a great Pakistani player.

Thank you Sachin, for being god for us!!

What's in a name? .. ipad

Shakespeare said "whats in a name..". Apple seems to be taking it seriously.

Yesterday when the "Applet tablet event live" was going on, there was more discussion on the naming than on the specs. My view is rather than going with their old nomenclature of iMac/iPod, they should have gone with iPhone like naming and called it iSlate. I hope they still change it before it becomes a total confusion in day to day life for women.

I think this is a big shame on apple that their most awaited launch since iPhone has been totally dumped by the audience. Out of 100s of tweets that I followed while the event was on, there were hardly any tweets on new features. Most people called it a magnified iPod Touch, some called it large iPhone without calling features.

The most important missing features was camera for video conferencing. If they have put iWork on it, do they expect the person to carry another device for video conferencing? I think there has been a major downgrade in the feature list by apple to take into consideration the business limitations of not conflicting with iPhone.

This likely being the last big launch of apple under Steve Jobs, I had expected much better.

The only real surprise for almost everyone was price, lets see if the price alone can sell this. Never underestimate the power of apple fan following.

Home loan overdraft calculation sheet

Okay, so blogger does not allow uploading attaching files but google docs does, its a cool new feature I think. 

Here you go. The excel sheet can be found here. The copy of the description from gharonda email is as below:

It handles max of 20 years of loan calculation. Does the EMI, pre-EMI calculation for you. For simplicity sake I am assuming the deposit is made on 1st, else one can calculate and put the number.

For basic users, please fill in the sheet with yellow color cells, rest will be calculated automatically.

For others who want to put in different amounts in different months can modify the blue colored cells.

In the given sheet a sample is already filled in, it shows that along with EMI of Rs. 9651 if we pay only 500 extra in this account for a 20 year loan of Rs. 10 lakhs, the interest saving is 2.15 lakhs, please note that at no point of time did we actually maintain a balance of more than 1 lakh (approx). After 207 months in this example, you can stop paying EMIs as it will be taken care by the savings you would have put in this account.

This sheet can be further modified to calculate interest for interest rate changes and part disbursal. Let me know if anyone needs these options.

The few things to try here are:

1) If you just put your monthly savings every month, how does it look. (Remember your saving is working hard for you)

2) If you just put your annual bonus into this account, how does it look. (Its better than pre-payment, as the amount is not gone away, if you need you can withdraw)

To take max advantage of this loan I recommend:

1) Take max tenure possible

2) Take max amount of loan possible, put the rest in this account and you have a ready emergency fund which works for you.

I call this account "magic" account :-). It’s a magic account for people who are disciplined, if you put some money and keep on removing it every month, then it does not get you that good a benefit.

 

Loan Amount	1,000,000.00
Interest	10.00%
Tenure	20.00
EMI	9651.00
Start Date	40200.00
Pre EMI	2740.00
Total interest	1316240.00
Net Monthly Addition	500.00

 

Effective Tenure	207.00
Effective Interest	1,101,606.82
Interest Saving	214,633.18

Cheers!

Home Loans with overdraft account

We have a google group of techies from Hyderabad call Gharonda where we share information regarding various residential projects and related stuff like loans. It is a good initiative as a group of people interested in a particular project can get together and go for bulk deals. Recently other groups have spun-off for other cities on similar lines.

Here is an email I sent out to Gharonda group some time back which many found very useful.

I would very very strongly advise everyone to look at the scheme of home loan where loan is awarded as overdraft. It saves interest and thereby reduces tenure, and turns the argument that home is very illiquid investment on its head.

More details on above.. 

This facility is currently offered by SBI (30 lakh limit), Citibank, HSBC and stanchart. Only citibank and SBI are pursuing home loan customers seriously at the moment.

In this type of loan a current account(no 3.5% interest as in case of savings account) is opened in your name where balance is :

-1 * loan amount

and the interest is charged on outstanding -ve balance. A simple example would be, lets say one takes a loan of 25 lakhs, so the starting balance would be -25 lakhs, which would keep reducing with as the EMIs progress.

Then as and when possible, we should put all our savings into this account. All amount deposited are withdrawble like we can withdraw from a savings account using debit card, cheque or online transfers.

Assuming that after the payment of 24k EMI you are saving another 10k per month, it can be deposited in this account and the interest can be saved. Lets say in the first month, the loan outstanding was 25 lakhs, and a deposit of Rs. 1 lakh was made on 10th, so for first 9 days interst is charged on 25 lahks, then for remaining month the interest is charged on only Rs. 24 lakhs which was the outstanding balance. So just by keeping 1 lakh in that account you would have saved 10%/12 * 20/30 * 1 lakhs = Rs. 555 in interest and this has been reduced in your outstanding principal, that means though you paid the same EMI, you have taken a tiny step towards a quicker loan repayment. This small "Extra" payment into your homeloan will save you interest till the tenure of your loan.

The best advantage of this product in a few years you can deposit all your savigns in this loan, bring the outstanding balance to 0 and pay 0 interest on your loan, without any prepayment and have ample liquidity for all your emergency needs.

I think SBI has waived off the limit of 30 lakhs, as one of my friends recently got a loan of 35-40 lakhs with the new 8 pct scheme and overdraft account.

There is an excel sheet that I prepared to demonstrate the calculation, let me figure out how to attach it and I will post it here.

Cheers!